The present invention relates to a hyper-media document management system, and more particularly to a hyper-media document management system having navigation mechanism.
A hyper-media document is a document having nodes and links. The nodes indicate media data such as images, figures, texts, vocal sounds and animations. The links indicate relationship between the nodes. In the hyper-media document, mechanism of tracing between the nodes is called "navigation". A hyper-media management system manages the navigation mechanism.
A conventional hyper-media management system has a node manager and a link manager. The node manager reads or writes a node identifier. The link manager reads or writes a link identifier. The node identifier may include node types. The link identifier may includes link types.
In the conventional hyper-media document management system, since interface between an application program and a hyper-media document is different depending on the application program, some functions must be implemented for each application program. For example, user verification function is required for multi-user environment. Moreover, distributed access function is required for referring to a node maintained by another system on the network. Since these functions are defined and implemented by each application program, it is difficult to share the hyper-media document among the application programs. For example, an evaluation scheme of an access condition defined by one application program may be different from another application program's.